A blue sky moment with Monty Don

Monty Don is back with two gardening shows on television. He speaks to Mary
Keen

Monty Don says he was surprised when the BBC rang to offer him his old job presenting Gardeners’ World, and even more surprised when they suggested it should be filmed in his own garden.

“But,” he adds, “I wouldn’t have gone back if they hadn’t.”

He had a break from television, following a stroke in 2008. But now fully recovered, he is back at the helm of Gardeners’ World and also found the time to make his own series, Monty Don’s Italian Gardens, which is usually scheduled after Gardeners’ World. These days, Friday nights on BBC2 are practically a Monty Don monopoly.

Seven years ago, while trying to write an article about the best young hands on gardeners in England, I was slightly annoyed with Monty and the BBC. I wanted to write about Marcus Chilton Jones, who was in charge of Berryfields, then the Gardeners’ World garden. The BBC refused to allow me to write about him, on the grounds that “it is Monty’s garden”, even though it was well known that Don lived miles away. I reminded the BBC that Monty himself had said: “I believe that honesty is the base currency of any TV presenter.”

However, when it was announced that he was to return and that the programme was to be filmed at his own place, I felt I owed him an apology and a lunch, as well as a round of applause for getting his way about being filmed at home.

His love of Italy extends to Italian food as well as Italian gardens, and the River Café in West London was where he suggested we meet. It was a perfect blue-sky day. We ate outside in the sun and I saw why he is so popular. He Just Is Nice. Three men walking along the towpath spotted him and dashed over with a camera.

“Can we have a picture for the wives?” they asked, before taking it in turns to pose with him. Moments earlier I had suggested that it must be hell being famous, to which he replies: “It goes with the territory. If you agree to be on television that’s all part of what you agree to. But if someone came up with a camera now, I would feel intruded upon. It’s the price you pay.”

He admits that his wife Sarah finds the publicity excruciating. He talks about her a lot, with great affection, and says that the garden is as much hers as his, a fact that tends to be forgotten.

Why, I wonder, does he do it? All presenters are given a rough time. Only a month into the new series and blogs are already suggesting he is just a posh amateur. The horticultural trade dislikes him because all organic proselytising affects sales. Monty rejects chemicals in any form. Even Roundup for bindweed.

It is probably true that he doesn’t know as much as Alan Titchmarsh, but he says: “I want to be an amateur, not a professional. Being an amateur means that you only do it for love. You share the same set of emotions and responses as other gardeners.”

He thinks too much horticultural technique can be off-putting. What he wants is not to change the way we prune our fruit, or divide our hellebores, but to be a person who encourages people to garden. “The main function of Gardeners’ World is to get people to get it,” he says.

He feels you don’t need instruction based on regulation and expertise, as much as the encouragement to just start growing. He wants us to love our gardens as much as he loves his and believes that gardening makes people calmer and happier.

“It teaches patience and the fact that slow small achievements can offer a huge pleasure (he’s quite one for emphasising words) out of all proportion to what has been done,” he says. “It doesn’t matter how you do it, it’s the doing, the process that counts.”

Monty doesn’t want people to be intimidated by the fact that Long Meadow looks large and formal. That’s another online criticism. Yes, his two-acre garden is larger than most, but it is probably not that much bigger than Berryfields and until recently he has had no help.

So it looks a friendly enough place, not manicured to within an inch of its growth – just a place where he wanders about, growing, experimenting and enjoying.

Monty likes a formal structure but he also likes the toppling into collapse, “when the whole garden goes 'whoosh’ and the structure gets blurred, softened and even lost”.

Among his favourite gardens is Sissinghurst in Kent. Not much poetry left there, I suggest. He says that when you expose a garden to intense scrutiny and run it by rules, the first thing out is poetry.

I suspect what still grabs him at Sissinghurst is that Adam Nicolson is a very old friend. Monty admits that the most important thing about a garden for him is the emotional engagement – the links with things he loves.

I ask about modern gardens – he’s seen plenty and he says: “I suspect I know less about the modern movement than I should.”

He grows grasses and plans to grow more but, on conceptual gardens, he is unashamedly old-fashioned. “If a place doesn’t communicate on a subjective or emotional level – if it needs explaining, then it’s not working,” he says.

His wife is more adventurous. When he says “you can’t hide behind a good idea”, she suggests he may be missing out by not opening his mind to the idea of beauty in unfamiliar places.

His inner life has sometimes been hard and he is clearly clever, but there is no side or edge about Monty, no patronising. And not much agonising.

He is happy to admit to failures (the box hedges at Long Meadow look beyond awful) and he says with emphasis, but no arrogance: “I don’t mind what people think of me.” I hope that does not change.

I muttered a bit about his co-presenters, who are normal and agreeable to meet in person, but who I find irritating to watch on TV. Why, I ask? “Television makes caricatures of people,” Monty says sadly. Can you, I wonder, caricature a man who is just plain nice?

If he doesn’t change, his garden will a little. He has always been very laid-back about when things were done and has been known to say “We’ll get there” when the vegetable garden is still empty in May.

The programme means the garden has to be readier and tidier than it used to be. The demands of television are relentless and for the first time he has some help, an ex-Kew student, Jess, who works for Monty, not for the BBC.